Building a RIDICULOUSLY Overpowered DOS PC - Retro Rocket 

I think the fact that you could reuse the case of your very first own computer makes this build even more special. It's a glorified retro gaming beast now.

Your video makes me once again regret that I didn't save the populated motherboards, cards, and floppy drives from every system I've ever built from my first one based upon an AMD Am386DX-40.

Damn. I pretty much cried as kid cause our first PC had Hercules card and it was really limiting factor on games. Never thought someone would make Doom run on it 😂

This is awesome! The sound card NT driver situation is kind of hilarious. Also those credit card sized microSD holders look mighty tempting…

Came here after YT reccomended me your "Cursed Graphics Cards" short and I've got to say, I love old tech content. ❤ Happy to be a new subscriber.

You absolute magnificent mad man! You my have single handedly constructed the blueprint for legacy pcs for the next 10 years. Way to go!

You used to be able to do a manual configuration in the device manager for specific hardware. I'd probably disable the parallel and serial ports (leave one active for a serial mouse or other hardware) to free up as many irq and io addresses as possible. Check what resources your sound card is using via any dos game with a sound setup program. You can then use that info to set the resources the card needs manually. I used to get this error for an old sound card I had in the 90s. I vaguely remember having to install the card in dos as well.

LOL you beat me.. I was gonna ask you if it runs Crysis LOL!

Man this brings back some memories. You should totally come to DEFCON in Vegas and find a way to either do a talk, village, or workshop. I know people bring old hardware and PCs.

5:06 it's actually refreshing seeing these old parts in a video

Sweet build! I love the retro case.

Dude that SD Card holder is Sweet, I had no idea they even made them in that form, gotta check it out. Keep up the vids

A great fan from your content man

Awesome build, man.

I had a Athlon XP back in the day. I picked the one with the fast FSB (IIRC 333Mhz rather than 266Mhz, so it might have been this exact chip). Got some Ram that could run at that speed too, an ATI GPU, NVidia chipset board and a PSU. The damn thing was unstable in 3DMark. I got all the parts from some online place that was excellent with returns. Tried swapping out the GPU and PSU. Still unstable. Eventually I found out that the ram I'd got couldn't in fact run at the fast FSB it claimed. Manually downclocked it to the slow speed. Very stable and no perceptible loss in performance. However the onboard sound was glitchy so I ended up buying a cheap sound card. This sysem put me off AMD/ATI and only now would I consider them. Basically no Intel system I've had, and I've had a few, would have had this issue with ram because Intel would probably have special-cased the ram I bought and run it slower than it claimed it was capable of. Intel seem to have invented XMPP so they can select a low, safe speed by default but enable the fast and less safe mode on ram they've tested. Also ram branding is more Crucial now than it used to be, in the sense that if you buy your ram from them it will run fine at the claimed speed. I still feel a bit bad about that parts place who saw their profit margin wiped out by me exchanging parts that were probably perfectly fine.

I never knew you could get this inclusive using old hardware!

Great Built Adlib makes Doom sound Fantastic!!

Brilliant Andy

I have a 386dx40 that I've been modding. I never thought to just have different CF cards with different OSes on them ready to go like you do. Nice.

Really fun build! I love it when people take on the same challenge I did in trying to build a wide range DOS PC. My route is similar but a little different. I went with a newer ASUS A8V socket 939 motherboard and an Athlon 64 X2 4200+. So under XP I can access 3.5GB of RAM and have two cores. Under 98 I cap the ram to 512mb with the Windows 98 Memory Burn Driver. For the graphics card I went with the 6800GT which has native 98 drivers and also runs Crysis 1 well on low. I considered 7000 but the hacked drivers have a driver that is to new for maximum stability. The problem is that starting at the 6000 series they dropped certain texture support so I also added a Voodoo 2 to the mix to cover the gap. My FSB is to fast for static linked games in DOS so it only works with dynamic linked games and I made my own modded Voodoo 2 driver bundle to make that easy. The soundcard issue i solved differently. For Windows I went with the Audigy 1 for great DOS prompt support and EAX. But for DOS i needed better compatibility. The socket 939 chipset from VIA still has all the ISA stuff functioning on the PCI ports so soundblaster emulation is possible with the right card. There is one that can do it very well and that is the ESS Solo-1. Once initialized the card hijacks some DMA functions making it work and for many games I do not even need a TSR. It works in every mode, even real mode games. I also load a special program that turns the mixer on the audigy on so i can have passtrough from the solo-1 and the cd drive without having to mess with cables. Last but not least is the lower end games. 8086 stuff, so games like sopwith. Those also work on my build and will likely work with yours to! All you need is cpuspd which gives you very good control over things like power states, multipliers and cache. So you can get very good results with it. That means with our builds you should be able to play even the earliest DOS games and then reboot into crysis.

cool. loved the screenshots of fast doom on hercules.

Cool video. Sadly you've made my go build an Athlon PC for Win 9x now :) Merry X-MAS!

Just found your channel, love this video :)

Awesome build!

Watched your TY short an then this video and I loved it 😄

god I love that cases are *still* ibm compatible, and vice versa. It's so magical knowing that, with the right adapters, any hardware is still compatible, even internally.

very cool video! Subbed!

Whoa! Hercules DooM!

QDI was a subsidiary of Lenovo (then called Legend), it produced boards for both Legend-branded systems and DIY PCs, and QDI boards were very popular in China in the late 90s. I tried using my 512MB 7600 GT AGP with a Gigabyte 8I865GME-775 mainboard and a Core 2 CPU last weekend, and the graphics card refused to work unless I flashed the VBIOS for 256 MB cards and replaced the two 1 GB RAM sticks with a single 256 MB of DDR 400, even if I set the MaxPhysPage to 10000. This rig runs Windows 2000 without any issues but problematic with 98, so I'm looking for another machine that can run Win98 out of the box... Thanks for your video!

Awesome video - my word - that Hercules Doom. Nice.

Awesome build

Love the Channel

if you have a 3d printer, you can grab a mounting plate with faceplate for your case and 3d print a faceplate with everything ready for you to mount the SD card to and have it accessible that way. I have printed quite a few of them for my retro machines. Very fun.

I have a PII-400 with DOS&Win3.1, Win 95, Win 98 and XP on it. I taught a computer class and used it to demonstrate the BLOATWARE.

Also, this video was fun. Thanks!👍

Cool build. Ironically I build a XP machine just by reciclying a lying pc combining parts. And it's a Athlon XP at 1.25 and for dos I got a working k6-2 (potencially 3) and some 2 old hp Vectra. All of this came seeing people doing retro projects like this one. I started appreciating more old hw so I found what I had on storage and Frankenstein everything I could. I hope you can do more projects since seems really interesting to try.

Love it!

What needs to be created is a thru parallel (db25) cutout port SD card reader. Reads full sized SD cards, with adaptor for micro and mini cd cards. Could probably provide an additional micro SD slot. Both these accessable from outside. With an IDE or SATA cable to the host controller. LEDs would be nice, power and access lights for each slot. With mechanical push to eject mechanism. Probably with either or both software/ button dismount disk(s) function. Definitely monitor disk eject function, but if prevented an emergency eject function like optical drives.

Unreal Tournament ♥️

I was, in fact, looking for a good way to store my overabundance of SD cards, so thanks for that!

Currently rocking a KT133A retro rocket myself! I have found success with the board you mentioned, but I'm currently using a Soltek SL75-KAV with an Athlon XP-M 3000+ (extremely unsupported but works on all my SL75-KAVs). The jumpers only let the system boot at 12x but CrystalCPUID can get it up to 16.5x. Works great if your addon hardware doesn't lock the system up.

A faster CPU will be Barton based mobile processor. I used to have ABIT KT133A main board supporting SDram and 1 ISA slot that boots up Barton Athlon XP-M CPU. Was a sweet PC!

I have the same passion for the same reason; but, I went for two Windows 98se computers and one Windows XP, and finally my Windows 10 computer. It's my hobby, I have tons of games, too many really; but, collecting all the games was alot of fun, and building all my computers has been a learning experience, and alot of fun too. For Glide games on Windows 98se, all you need is DirectX 9.0c installed along with a compatible DirectX 9 video card(mine is a Geforce FX5700), and install nGlide version 1.05. I have found that I can play all my old glide games that way without the high cost of buying a 3dfx Voodoo card. I will admit that my one Windows 98 PC has a 3dfx Voodoo 1 paired with a Geforce MX400, I run Need For Speed II SE ,POD, and Wing Commander Prophecy on that machine to name but a few, I have 42 games for that computer alone, mostly glide. :)

I love it, it's even faster than my own Pentium 4 DOS/Windows 98 machine.

Thanks.

Damn, yours is bigger than mine, lol! 1.68GHz overclocked P3 Tualatin is my fastest retro rocket. I also re-used a special case with some history when I built my first retro PC, the Dual 1GHz Slot 1 Pentium 3 system. Originally that case housed a PC I built for a client in the early 2000's, one of my first hardware sales - which I would end up buying back years later as a used machine, upgrading the internals and using it as my own desktop system until about 2009. Then it sat as discarded parts until 2019 when I lovingly cleaned up the case and re-used it to build my first retro PC!

Glad to see someone else who enjoys Deus Ex. I love that game

Like the Hercules graphics adapter, I also dither in real time.

I frequently get the urge to build a retro gaming PC. But my dreams are quickly dashed when I see the prices of these components on eBay.

I'm about to get an Ensoniq / Creative ES1370/71 for my own "retro rocket", maybe that might solve a few problems. Does seem to work with DOS stuff from what I've seen online.

I built a similar retro rocket, but using a Pentium 4, Geforce ti4200 and a Soundblaster Live! PCI card - it's surprisingly good for a lot of DOS games despite not being an ISA card. Can play from most DOS games to anything up to Half Life 2 fairly well, but I might upgrade the GPU to a Geforce 6800 for DX9 support.

Apart from no ISA, I recommend shuttle XPC, as they are so compact so making them more convenient for most people as they don't get int he way or are easy to store and get out when you want to use them. I got a P4 3.2ghz one with DVD R/W and 2.5 Floppy (though will likely get a gotek emulator to replace that) with a 9800 pro, Audigy 2 ZS with 1gb DDr 400. I dual boot it with windows 7 32bit and Windows 98 SE. I picked up a cheap 500GB seagate hybrid drive that I use for windows 98 SE as its pretty fast without the trim concerns (plus 32GB main aprtition then the rest as storage is handy. Windows 7 is just on 120GB SSD with the shared storage from the hybrid drive making transferring files and the like nce and easy. Throw on a DVI to hdmi adapter and its even more convenient as it can connect to all my monitors or even the TV. They are currently pretty cheap and many are good to go out of the box for most people needs without having to have a big box retro PC, though if you want sata on board, those seem to be harder to find and have a bigger price tag unless you get lucky.

I have 5 machines that are like that from an old work render farm. But they just sit on a shelf. I never considered them to be "DOS" machines. For personal needs I instead built a dual P3-1GHz on an ASUS P2B-DS, which has the best drivers support for everything from DOS/Linux up to Win XP, where it can see 2 CPU's. Everything else defaults to 1. Dual ISA slots, PCI, AGP, 1st gen USB, but that's easily fixed with a more modern PCI USB card. 2 types of SCSI. Sadly, SSD adapters only exist for 50-ping SCSI, and for 68-pin UltraWide, I don't think there's anything on the market. That would've given SATA-like speeds in DOS. Graphics - Voodoo 5500, and AWE64 + GUS in the ISA slots. GUS good up to Win98. Voodoo runs surprisingly well under XP. I have a board with dual 1.4GHz Tualatins on ASUS CUV4X, but that one has no ISA slots, and isn't as DOS-friendly, despite being a single generation after the 440 chipset.

something I've always wanted to test was a"PC/PCI" or "SB LINK" port on some motherboards and pci sound cards, it allows you to get fully compatible sound blaster support on newer systems without an ISA bus by adding a 5 pin cable, there are zero videos about this even through it was common in the early 2000's

I realise this is months down the line, but I distinctly remember using my ens1371-based card in dos, and there were drivers for it.

That DOOM sound. 👌🏼

Thanks for making me realize I may have the parts to do this. LOL.

Interesting build, especially running Crysis with an ISA soundcard. Unfortunately, the Adlib sounds terrible on that card, lol. I guess if you aren't playing too many DOS games on it, it's not a deal-breaker, but good Adlib sound is probably my biggest requirement for DOS, so I only use cards with a real Yamaha OPL chip.

experience having a supercomputer in the old days

7:30 - First of all - good chipset drivers for VIA with patches. Second go to device manager and set manually parameters like IRQ, DMA and so on. This way its works if your card isnt plug and play.

A 7600GT ! Whatttt legend

I had that exact same pc case for our 1ghz Celeron computers, I played hl2 on that junker

Hey thanks for the video. At 10:36 what type of shelves are they? Looking to buy some for myself

I have kept my K7N2 boards / PCs (the 400mhz FSB editions) all with AMD K7 3200 cpus. They have all the connections, are excellent boards and run every OS

I’d love to recreate a retro rocket like the system I had back in the mid 2000s, loved AMD then and had an nforce 2 based Soltek board and a Barton core XP3200, MSI ti4800 agp card. Working in the industry and having access through friends and trading/swapping etc I ended up with a Tyan Tiger 2466 with matched MP2800 cpus, it was fast as hell but crap for gaming compared to the nforce board/XP processor. If I still had those rigs they’d likely need recapping, still have the 450w aerocool psu that ran them but not powered it up in years.

I had a problem concentrating on what you were saying in this one - might be the funky background music.

I feel like for the sound card in win 98 you need to go digging around the internet for a better driver. It's really annoying to do this since sometimes there are multiple versions of the same sound card and sometimes if they are OEM they use a different driver that may even be on the recovery cd if you can find it. Edit: probably not the issue the more I think and look over the description and vaguely see in the video so I added some replies to this with some additional thoughts.

To use NT 4.0 or 3.5 drivers you can try to tweek install inf files to make them compatible with XP. I saw made from XP to Win98SE for my LG 32" TV-Monitor. But it hard to do for all other drivers as their inf can be realy complex.

4:00 The DOOM music sounds like the goddamn 32X version!

Basically my dream PC. The Geforce driver link is dead. I don't suppose you know where else to get these? Thanks

FreeDOS runs on every PC that has a Legacy BIOS mode. So the most ridiculously overpowered DOS PC is just a modern PC that has this mode. Though it won't run games with sound because DOS games directly access sound cards and don't understand integrated sound, you need something with SB emulation (and even the Aureal Vortex, the most compatible SB emulating PCI card, displays severe stability issues on newer chipsets). My own retro rocket PC is a Pentium 4 with an old Intel chipset which works just fine with Aureal Vortex under DOS.

I like doing overkill setups in retrogaming as well, i have something like this Celeron 3.06GHZ LGA775 Gigabyte ga-8vm800pmd-775-rh (agp and ddr2) 2x256mb ddr2 533mhz Nvidia vanta lt 16mb 30Gb IDE HDD (i like the sound...) Working well on w98 and its games, but for DOS gaming Pentium 2 350MMX with ISA soundblaster is my choice.

You can get industrial mainboards with ISA, PCI and PCIe slots and modern CPUs. The PCIe hardware is a bit tricky or even impossible to get working under DOS and older Windows versions, though. Your build is nice, though.

If i remember correctly, running ISA soundcard on Win2000, it can only play sound from 1 application at the time. Did u experience the same with those ISA card on XP?

What's the song at the beginning? Its groovy af 🔥

IRQ Conflict?

I have a bit of a retro rocket in a HP desktop I found in the trash with a Coppermine 1Ghz. Only problem is no ISA. I have a 166MMX with a ISA sound card though... Not much space in this apartment for more

Your storage looks similar to mine. I am jealous though. I want an Acorn A3000 or later RISC pc, and I want an Amstrad CPC machine, but they never released here in the US as far as I can tell. So they never show up here where I live. Some day though.

Fastest rocket DOS machines I have is Athlon X2 5600+AM2 with X800 XL 256MB with ESS Solo-1 and SB 128 PCI (cause I like its wavetable MIDI) and Voodoo2 12MB. Also have similar configuration but with Athlon 3000+ s754 with two V2's 12MB in SLI and FX5900 and similar sound cards. Those are both DOS and Win98 computers. GPUs for both computers run on Windows 98. I could go with GeForce 6800 but I do not like it for retro PCs as it doesn't do 16-bit dithering. Newer games I can run just fine on my modern PC

I remember 512MB SDRAM sticks being huge and unobtainable for my 14-year-old self

out of curiosity, what kind of slot is that that you have just above the AGP slot? its the same color and width as an agp slot, but a bit shorter, and its a lot further towards the metal bracket than AGP is. never seen anything like it.

GTA with the frame limiter on actually still looked fast to me

Look man you probs know what your doing so I wont bore you. Disregard if its no new info. When struggling with drivers, just install the windows compatible with the device. Navigate to system32 then drivers. Copy all driver name related folder. Install your newer windows and copy this driver folder to desktop. Right click the device and browse for driver. Select the folder, a error will appear as the driver isnt signed but you can just allow it. Ive found out of 100 times this has worked 100 times :)

98 / xp is my favorite time of computing

You kept fiddling with that backplane, and I assume that's also why you hauled out the "specialized ISA Pentium 4 motherboard", which is the central card for said backplane? Is this going to be somewhere?

I am very new to retrocomputing, can I kindly ask you what is the rainbow colored keyboard down right at 0:05? Thanks!

I have a few pentium 4 MBs with 3 isa slots!

Where did you get the Hercules?

2:31 How were you able to use an AMD Athlon XP on that motherboard? I have a similiar QDI motherboard (Kinetiz 7t) and according to the manual i found on the web it doesn't say that it supports AMD Athlon XP, only Athlon up to 1 Ghz or higher.

I have a Sinclair QL with tapes but I don’t have PSU for it you are interested in it

Or DMA Conflict?

Hey, what was the model of SBC card you showed with Xeon support?

I'm curious: what if you boot Windows XP with that "hercules" graphics adapter? 🤔

The original GTA is a funny one. Fast 2D cards will run the game too fast, but when using glide with an Orchid Righteous 3DFX card on it... Bliss!

With Windows 98se, you are locked into real IRQs, and they should not be shared. You may need to disable whatever uses IRQ5 in your motherboard BIOS. And don't forget to install sound support in CONFIG.SYS (load high) and AUTOEXEC.BAT files (not required on 2K/XP, but you still need to set BLASTER in environment variables). Enjoy!

I am so jealous.

1:59 I think this claim is not really true. From my experience there are a lot of PCI sound cards which provide a perfect 100% compatibility (with SB-link of course) with every DOS game. All this while giving you a much better and cleaner sound, compared to majority of ISA ones.

Ah yes, the dreaded MX440SE. I had one as well was was fine until the original Far Cry came out and needed shaders so I replaced it with a Nvidia FX5700. Huge difference and for all teh flack the FX series of cards got, I was more than happy with it.

I think it's time for a new Chain of Fools video. You can upgrade win10 from x86 to x64, so it's possible to go full-tilt and see if the legacy apps still work on Win11 x64. ;)

wow